Saturday, February 28, 2015

[This post is a continuation of the previous post on Adam
Phillips’ psychoanalytic theories of self-criticism. See below.]

In the following passage Phillips launches a veiled attack on
positive psychology, on the injunction to love oneself, to see the good in one’s
character:

We are
never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. A life
without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after
all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our
preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our
sense, our picture, of our so-called selves. Nothing makes us more critical –
more suspicious or appalled or even mildly amused – than the suggestion that we
should drop all this relentless criticism, that we should be less impressed by
it and start really loving ourselves.

Of course, powers of discrimination and judgment need not
always draw a negative conclusion. Unless you are armed with a flagellant’s
whip and feel a need to punish yourself for your miserable sin, conflating
judgment with criticism is unjust. Unless of course you are married to the Freudian theory of the superego.

Phillips may be speaking about himself, but there need not be any “violence”
in preferences. He has fallen into this trap because, instead of dealing with
moral sentiments and affections, he has limited himself to grand passions like
love and hate.

When he says that calls to love ourselves make us suspicious
or appalled or amused, he should say that he is speaking for himself, but that
is all. Most people do not believe that an enhanced awareness of their positive
character traits is a lure distracting from the dire Freudian truth.

If a life without a self-critical faculty seems to be an
idiocy, what are we to say about a life that is commanded and directed by a
self-critical faculty, thus by our feelings of guilt and our need to punish
ourselves? Doesn’t the latter seem as mindless as the former?

Ultimately, Phillips will offer a way out of this box, box that is of Freud's creation. But, why is it necessary to get into the box in the first place. Phillips notwithstanding do not imagine that the Freudian truth is anything less than Oedipal and tragic?

At this point, perhaps not too strangely Phillips goes off
on a long disquisition about the concept of “conscience” in Shakespeare. In
itself this appears to be a worthwhile endeavor.

And yet, rummaging
through Shakespeare to examine the different times he uses the word
“conscience,” as Phillips does, is not necessarily the best approach. When he
adds a series of learned definitions of words like conscience and catch, gleaned
from an Elizabethan dictionary he merely beclouds the enterprise.

He would have done better to explore the dramatic context of
the play. I agree that the dictionary definition has some relevance. I agree that other
uses of the word in other contexts might be relevant. And yet, the dramatic
context tells us more. Unfortunately, Phillips mostly ignores it.

Phillips begins with Shakespeare’s line: “… the play’s the
thing/ Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

It is easy to overcomplicate this line. The play that Hamlet
calls the “thing” is called “The Mousetrap.” It is the famous
play-within-a-play that Hamlet asks some traveling players to present before
the court.

With the performance Hamlet intends to show King Claudius a
theatrical representation of his murder of King Hamlet. He hopes to provoke the
king to expose his guilt in front of the court. After all, the King, we are led
to believe, has a conscience, that is to say, a moral sense that knows he did wrong. (Obviously, if he was a psychopath Claudius would have a vastly diminished moral sense.)

It’s a ruse, a trap, but unfortunately, one that has little
chance of success.

You know what happened. Claudius was moved by the play, but Hamlet
was the only one who knew or thought he knew why. For all anyone in the court
knew, Hamlet might have been revealing something about himself and might have
been announcing his intention to kill a king.

But, if the court did not see the king’s actions as a sign
of guilt, Hamlet’s revenge—had he taken it—might have been seen as madness, not
as justice for his dead father.

After Claudius left the play, he went to pray, perhaps to
do penance for his sins. Hamlet saws him at prayer. Armed with the
certainty that Claudius is guilty, but disarmed by the knowledge that his
action might well be misinterpreted, he did not take his vengeance.

Is this a sign of ambivalence? Not necessarily. It might
well be a sign of a melancholic disposition, manifested in the fact that Hamlet
can either over-react or under-react, but cannot get the action right. His is a
melancholic disposition. He cannot find the mean between the two extremes, because, for him there is none. Funnily enough, for Freud and psychoanalysis there is none either.

A bit later Hamlet quickly murdered Polonius, who was hiding
behind an arras in his mother’s bedchamber. Now he no longer needs to consider
himself a coward, but if he is capable of murder and incapable of murdering
Claudius, he still might consider himself as not quite up to the real job. He
is capable of murder, but not when it counts. This might make him more of a coward.

Murdering Polonius does manage to shift the play’s focus
from Hamlet’s revenge of his father’s murder to Laertes’ revenge for his
father’s murder.

More on this is in my book, The Last Psychoanalyst.

One is tempted to follow Phillips and Freud into Hamlet’s
mind. And yet, Hamlet is a fictional character: he is what he says and what he
does. By my interpretation, his failure to act exposes his anomie, not his
desire.

By that I meant that if he has not succeeded his father on
the throne of Denmark how does he know that he is his father’s son. And if he
is not his father’s son, and if even his father does not know it, why would he
be obliged to murder his uncle… who may, for all he knows, be his real father.

One might say that the action of the play tells all we need
to know about the meaning of the word “conscience.” And yet, Phillips avoids
such an analysis to look at the way the word is used in Elizabethan English and
the way Shakespeare uses it in other contexts.

It is interesting to note, as Phillips does, that in
Elizabethan usage, the word conscience is close to the word consciousness,
perhaps because in French the word conscience
bears both meanings. One imagines that this relates to the old Freudian idea that psychoanalysis was supposed to make the unconscious conscious.

According to Freud depression occurs when the ego turns its
hatred for an object against itself.

Phillips summarizes Freud’s thought:

‘We see
how one part of the ego,’ he writes in Mourning and Melancholia, ‘sets itself over against the other,
judges it critically and, as it were, takes it as its object.’ The mind, so to
speak, splits itself in two, and one part sets itself over the other to judge
it. It ‘takes it as its object’: that is to say, the super-ego treats the ego
as though it were an object not a person. In other words, the super-ego, the
inner judge, radically misrecognises the ego, treating it as if it can’t answer
back, as if it doesn’t have a mind of its own (it is noticeable how merciless
and unsympathetic we can be to ourselves in our self-criticism). It is
intimated that the ego – what we know ourselves to be – is the slave of the
super-ego. How have we become enslaved to this part of ourselves, and how and
why have we consented? What’s in it for us?

One must mention that cognitive psychology, to say nothing
of cognitive therapy has definitively refuted this notion. One must add that a
therapy based on externalizing anger and hatred has never been an effective
treatment for depression.

Phillips offers this explanation of Freud’s use of
Shakespeare:

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud
used Hamlet as, among
other things, a way of understanding the obscene severities of conscience.

‘The
loathing which should drive [Hamlet] on to revenge,’ Freud writes, ‘is replaced
in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he
himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.’ Hamlet,
in Freud’s view, turns the murderous aggression he feels towards Claudius
against himself: conscience is the consequence of uncompleted revenge.
Originally there were other people we wanted to murder but this was too
dangerous, so we murder ourselves through self-reproach, and we murder ourselves
to punish ourselves for having such murderous thoughts. Freud uses Hamlet to say that conscience is
a form of character assassination, the character assassination of everyday
life, whereby we continually, if unconsciously, mutilate and deform our own character.
So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we’d be like
without it. We know almost nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves
before we have a chance to see ourselves.

Freud
is showing us how conscience obscures self-knowledge, intimating indeed that
this may be its primary function: when we judge the self it can’t be known;
guilt hides it in the guise of exposing it. This allows us to think that it is
complicitous not to stand up to the internal tyranny of what is only one part –
a small but loud part – of the self. So frightened are we by the super-ego that
we identify with it: we speak on its behalf to avoid antagonising it
(complicity is delegated bullying). But in arguing with his conscience, in
trying to catch it, with such eloquence and subtlety, Hamlet has become a
genius of self-reproach; his conversations with himself and others about
conscience allow him to speak in ways no one had ever quite spoken before.

One hesitates to say it, but “the obscene severities of
conscience” is a clumsy phrase.

Here Phillips is obscuring the essential Freudian truth.
According to Freud Hamlet cannot act because he sees his desire in his uncle’s
actions. Hamlet suffers from an unanalyzed Oedipus complex, nothing more or
less.

Phillips is not quite correct to say that at one level
Freudian theory sees us murdering ourselves, destroying our character because it
is too dangerous to try to murder the one person we really want to murder.

He does, however, expose a basic truth about Freud. Freudian
psychoanalysis is an extended effort is self-flagellation and self-punishment.
It does not necessarily turn the ego’s hatred against itself, but it punishes
itself for having such impure thoughts.

As I have explained, Freud is the father of negative
psychology. To be fair, Phillips, following Lacan, wants to save us from our sins, but, one does not quite understand why anyone needs to descend that deeply into negativity before being rescued from it.

Phillips continues to explain that the superego tells us who
we really are. This makes very little sense, unless, of course, you believe
that you are functionally and essentially depraved and perverted.

Phillips also suggests that we enjoy the kind of
moral flagellation that constitutes self-criticism. A medieval monk might very
well believe, though medieval monks also believed in redemption and salvation
and heavenly bliss... through the church:

The
super-ego casts us as certain kinds of character; it, as it were, tells us who
we really are; it is an essentialist; it claims to know us in a way that no one
else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a mad god, it is
omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the
consequences of our actions – when we know, in a more imaginative part of
ourselves, that most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our
estimation. (No apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive,
no good is purely and simply that.) Self-criticism is an unforbidden pleasure:
we seem to relish the way it makes us suffer. Unforbidden pleasures are the
pleasures we don’t particularly want to think about: we just implicitly take it
for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of
self-disappointment, that every day we will fail to be as good as we should be;
but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what
is setting the pace, or where these rather punishing standards come from.
How can we find out what we think of all this when conscience never lets go?

Later in his essay, Phillips expands on Freud’s muddled
thought:

The
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are as nothing compared with the
murderous mufflings and insinuations and distortions of the super-ego because
it is the project of the super-ego, as conceived of by Freud, to render the
individual utterly solipsistic, incapable of exchange. Or to make him so
self-mortified, so loathsome, so inadequate, so isolated, so self-obsessed, so
boring and bored, so guilty that no one could possibly love or desire him. The
solitary modern individual and his Freudian super-ego, a master and a slave in
a world of their own. ‘Who do I fear?’ Richard III asks at the end of his play,
‘Myself? There’s none else by.’

Like
all unforbidden pleasures self-criticism, or self-reproach, is always
available and accessible. But why is it unforbidden, and why is it a pleasure?
And how has it come about that we are so bewitched by our self-hatred, so
impressed and credulous in the face of our self-criticism, unimaginative as it
usually is? Self-reproach is rarely an internal trial by jury. A jury, after
all, represents some kind of consensus as an alternative to autocracy.
Self-criticism, when it isn’t useful in the way any self-correcting approach
can be, is self-hypnosis. It is judgment as spell, or curse, not as
conversation; it is an order, not a negotiation; it is dogma not
over-interpretation. Psychoanalysis sets itself the task of wanting to have a
conversation with someone – call it the super-ego – who, because he knows what
a conversation is, is definitely never going to have one. The super-ego is a
supreme narcissist.

Here, Phillips (following Freud) has introduced a twist. He
presents the superego as something of an ultimate horror, a function of your
mind that has nothing else to do but to beat you up and make you loathsome to
yourself.

This might or not be true. Phillips and Freud take it as an
article of faith. But, after they have created this pronominal monstrosity—recall
that the German for superego is Uber-Ich—they propose to rescue you from it.

Evidently, as I have argued extensively, Freudian moral
theory is based on guilt and the threat of punishment. Specifically, it is
based on the threat of castration. Freud went as far as to say that women are
moral inferiors because they are impervious to castration threats.

Phillips wants to redeem this aspect of the theory so he
confuses the issue:

The
super-ego, by definition, despite Freud’s telling qualifications,
under-interprets the individual’s experience. It is, in this sense, moralistic
rather than moral. Like a malign parent it harms in the guise of protecting; it
exploits in the guise of providing good guidance. In the name of health and
safety it creates a life of terror and self-estrangement. There is a great
difference between not doing something out of fear of punishment, and not doing
something because one believes it is wrong. Guilt isn’t necessarily a good clue
as to what one values; it is only a good clue about what (or whom) one fears.
Not doing something because one will feel guilty if one does it is not
necessarily a good reason not to do it. Morality born of intimidation is
immoral. Psychoanalysis was Freud’s attempt to say something new about the
police.

True enough, guilt does not tell what one values. If so,
then the Freudian attempt to produce a morality out of guilt fails. Phillips
introduces his own concepts, like believing that something is wrong. In truth,
this cannot function as a moral principle without there being a sanction for
doing wrong.

And yet, Freud was not just trying to say something new
about the police. The assertion is glib. Freud was attempting to recreate a
form of human being that would have overcome shame and dispensed with the ethic
that would make it into a social being. And he was leaving the way to salvation open-- for others to find.

He and Lacan wanted people to overcome guilt, but especially
they wanted people to overcome shame. If desire is based on a taboo—the theory
suggests that you only want what you are forbidden to have—then Freudian creatures must descend into a constant conflict
between their desires and the threat of punishment... as a prelude to redemption.

In the end, by my lights, they move beyond morality and
beyond immorality… they attain to amorality. They defeat the superego and march
bravely forth to fulfill themselves, to act on their desires … regardless of
what anyone thinks.

For his part, Phillips believes in the redemptive power of
love. One might say that, in so doing, he has merely confirmed by argument, to
the effect that, at root, Freudian psychoanalysis was destined to become a
pseudo-religion.

In his words:

What is
this appetite for confinement, for diminishment, for unrelenting, unforgiving
self-criticism? Freud’s answer is beguilingly simple: we fear loss of love.
Fear of loss of love means forbidding certain forms of love (incestuous love,
or interracial love, or same sex love, or so-called perverse sexuality, or
loving what the parents don’t love, and so on).

Obviously, Freudian psychoanalysis must first convince us
that we are criminals. Then it teaches us to punish ourselves with bouts of
self-flagellation or self-criticism. Finally, in the hands of Lacan—though to a far lesser extent in Freud—it offers redemptive love…
within a worldwide cult.

Other more timid souls will say that by overcoming and repressing these
impulses we arrive at a later stage of object love and live happily ever after.

Phillips seems to belong to this camp. And Freud
occasionally holds out such hope. The problem is that Freud’s great mythic
creatures, Oedipus and Narcissus, did not live happily ever after.

To imagine that Freud’s late myth of the primal horde can
possibly lead to true love and happy marriages is naïve to an extreme.

Phillips offers his own twist:

We are
encouraged by all this censorship and judgment to believe that forbidden,
transgressive pleasures are what we really crave; that really, essentially,
deep down, we are criminals; that we need to be protected primarily from
ourselves, from our wayward desires.

In essence, he is saying that psychoanalysis is a con. But what is the point of convincing us that our truest desires are to commit criminal actions, see the
example of Oedipus, if they are not? If it opens the way to redemption, then perhaps it should be offering a way out of itself.

And yet, if Freud did not believe in the Oedipus complex he
believed in nothing. Surely, Lacan believed
that our desires are fundamentally criminal… and yet he held out a hope for
allowing us to act on them—while
redeeming us from the attendant guilt. Again, this would make human beings into
supernormal creatures, akin to the Nietzschean Ubermensch.

How do you arrive at this point? If you are Phillips (and perhaps Zizek) you
reduce the superego to a joke. You ridicule it. You make it like Don Quixote’s
Sancho Panza.

And you think that the superego is going to take this lying
down? You think that it will roll over and play dead, allowing you to do what
you want… without fearing punishment?

After regaling us with the horrors of the superego Phillips
is suggesting that psychoanalysis liberate us from a problem that is, after
all, its own creation.

And yet, once you make it that strong and that dominating,
why would anyone believe that you can flick your magic wand and reduce it to a
clown.

Even Lacan, who often got beyond the restrictions posed by the
superego, admitted publicly, late in his life, that he too had a superego. And,
for that fact he was compelled to declare that psychoanalytic practice was a
scam.

And yet, he too sought redemption. He knew that people would
always need to belong to groups, but he did not quite know how to bring
together a social group made up of Ubermenschen.

Psychoanalysis may be finished, but Adam Phillips has
apparently not gotten the memo. Soldiering on, Phillips has produced a long and
intricate essay on the Freudian theory of conscience and self-criticism.

To what purpose remains to be seen.

Since Phillips declares that we can over-interpret and
under-interpret, it is worth noting that we can also overcomplicate and
oversimplify matters. In his essay on self-criticism Phillips overcomplicates
several matters.

Therein he joins those who made a career out of obfuscating
Freudian thought. One suspects that they are doing so in order to hide the
truth, but that would mean that true-believing Freudians are in the business of
repression.

Who would’ve thunk it?

Anyway, Phillips begins by quoting the great obfuscator
himself, my old friend Jacques Lacan. And he finds a place where Lacan’s
thought is uncharacteristically clear. Here Lacan is taking issue with Christ, even though the rule first appeared in Leviticus 19; 18:

Lacan said
that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy
neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves. Or
you could say that, given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had
always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves: that is, with a
good deal of cruelty and disregard.

One appreciates the overly clever cynicism, but if human
beings had really treated each other as badly as Lacan thinks they have, there
would never have been any functioning human communities. And since human beings
always live in communities, most of which function at one level or another,
Lacan’s pessimism, as Freudian as it is, falls short.

Here, Lacan is being a good Freudian. Note the word “actually.” It suggests that your self-loathing is more authentic than whatever positive feelings you have about yourself.

Psychoanalysis is based on the notion that people all hate each other. Freud, we recall, believed that his fellow humans were trash. One is tempted to say that Lacan is just talking about himself and those who became part of his school, but that would appear to be churlish.

Still and all, if Lacan has offered the Freudian truth here he is implying that those who do not hate themselves and others have not been properly psychoanalyzed.

Phillips does not say so but he is really addressing the positive psychology of Martin Seligman et al. And he is attempting to undermine cognitive treatments that, by his misreading, attempt to ignore the fundamental badness of human beings in favor of a rosy scenario where people love themselves and even their neighbors.

One suspects that Phillips has addressed the issues raised by the cognitivists in other works. And yet, he ought to have mentioned them here, if only to specify his target.

Phillips continues:

‘After all,’ Lacan writes, ‘the people who
followed Christ were not so brilliant.’

Obviously, this is a gratuitous slur. Beginning with the disciples and apostles, most notably Saul of Tarsus, the people who followed
Christ did found a major world religion. I leave it to you to decide whether
this shows a lack of intelligence.

You cannot say as much about psychoanalysis, which currently
stands as a dying cult. Besides, Lacan once said that the Catholic Church would
easily outlive Freudian psychoanalysis.

When it comes to great minds, I venture that a Christian
would happily take up the challenge, pitting Augustine, Jerome, Aquinas, William
of Ockham and Teresa of Avila against Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi and Melanie
Klein. Those who still follow Lacan are no longer the best and the brightest.

As it happens, both Lacan and Phillips are obscuring the
meaning of the Biblical rule. As it appears in Leviticus and the New Testament it
sought to help people to overcome the law of the talion—an eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth.

Leviticus offers two versions of the law. First:

Forget
about the wrong things people do to you, and do not try to get even. Love your
neighbor as you love yourself.

And this, from Leviticus 19; 34:

But
treat them just as you treat your own citizens. Love foreigners as you love
yourselves, because you were foreigners one time in Egypt. I am the Lord your
God.

I explained these points in my book The Last Psychoanalyst. Apparently and inexplicably, Phillips has
not read it.

And yet, for all I know he has read by book and is trying to
respond to it in this essay. One does not like to imagine that he would not mention a book that has provoked his thoughts because he does not want
to give it any attention.

Be that as it may, from whence cometh the self-loathing that
is displayed by the Freudian superego.

Unfortunately, it makes some sense.

After all, your heart’s desire is to copulate with your
mother and if you are willing to commit patricide to accomplish that end, then
you might very well end up hating yourself.

If that is what you really, really want to do, then a goodly
amount of crippling self-loathing might be necessary lest you act on your
depraved desires.

In his essay Phillips is addressing the advent of the human
moral sense. Since he, a good Freudian, can only understand it within the
context of a culturally imposed narrative, he places it within the Oedipus complex.

He does not want to deny the Oedipus complex and wants to
explain why more people don’t act on it, so Phillips like Freud and like Lacan must
believe that the human mind is divided against itself, engaged in a permanent
struggle against its depraved desires.

Phillips offers a clever twist here, one that Lacan might
well accept. Meditating on human
ambivalence, he declares that love and hate are so closely entwined that we
often love people we hate and hate people we love.

He writes:

If
someone can satisfy us, they can frustrate us; and if someone can frustrate us
we always believe they can satisfy us. And who frustrates us more than
ourselves?

Unfortunately, this is a bit too clever. If someone who can
satisfy us refuses, do we really want to destroy him or her? We might want to
try to be more charming. We might look to someone else for satisfaction.

As often happens in Freudian thought, the narrative obscures reality.

Surely, it does happen that we grow to hate certain people,
but often the reason has more to do with a betrayal than with a failure to
satisfying our wants and needs. We hate people who threaten us, and a refusal
to satisfy our wants and needs rarely counts as a threat to our being. We are
more likely to hate a spouse who has humiliated us by having an affair with our
neighbor than we are to hate him or her for turning down a sexual request.

As for the notion that we frustrate ourselves, this assumes
that we are using ourselves to satisfy ourselves. This harkens back to an old
definition of narcissism, to the effect that the narcissist takes his own body
to be the object of his sexual desire.

One might have difficulty imagining why this formula would
ever be frustrating. With the notable exception of your sexual functioning, your
body, after all, is not going to say No to whatever you want to do to it.

With one notable and visible exception: the male sexual organ. One hastens to mention the importance of phallic functioning for Lacan's theorizing, but one would be remiss if one did not underscore, as I did in my book, that Augustine of Hippo first opined on the fact that this single organ did not respond to the will's commands. And it did not function automatically like the heart.

Friday, February 27, 2015

In an interview with the Catholic journal “America” Paglia
responded to a question about contemporary feminism. Therein she addressed the
current discussion about rape culture.

She wants colleges and universities to cease policing
student behavior and she insists that the right place to deal with crime is the
criminal justice system. She also believes that women, on college campuses and
elsewhere, should take appropriate caution in their behavior. Every mother
tells her daughter as much.

Without further ado, here’s Paglia:

After
the great victory won by my insurgent, pro-sex, pro-fashion wing of feminism in
the 1990s, American and British feminism has amazingly collapsed backward again
into whining, narcissistic victimology. As in the hoary old days of Gloria
Steinem and her Stalinist cohorts, we are endlessly subjected to the hackneyed
scenario of history as a toxic wasteland of vicious male oppression and gruesome
female suffering. College campuses are hysterically portrayed as rape
extravaganzas where women are helpless fluffs with no control over their own
choices and behavior. I am an equal opportunity feminist: that is, I call for
the removal of all barriers to women's advance in the professional and
political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women, which I
reject as demeaning and infantilizing. My principal demand (as I have been
repeating for nearly 25 years) is for colleges to confine themselves to
education and to cease their tyrannical surveillance of students' social lives.
If a real crime is committed, it must be reported to the police. College
officials and committees have neither the expertise nor the legal right to be
conducting investigations into he said/she said campus dating fiascos. Too many
of today's young feminists seem to want hovering, paternalistic authority
figures to protect and soothe them, an attitude I regard as servile,
reactionary and glaringly bourgeois. The world can never be made totally safe
for anyone, male or female: there will always be sociopaths and psychotics
impervious to social controls. I call my system "street-smart
feminism": there is no substitute for wary vigilance and personal
responsibility.

And then, Paglia was asked about post-structuralism, the ideology
that came to infest Humanities departments in the late 1960s and that has pretty
much destroyed the credibility of literary studies. Having expressed similar
views myself on various occasions I am happy to applaud Paglia. She is right:

Post-structuralism
is a system of literary and social analysis that flared up and vanished in
France in the 1960s but that became anachronistically entrenched in British and
American academe from the 1970s on. Based on the outmoded linguistics of
Ferdinand de Saussure and promoted by the idolized Jacques Derrida, Jacques
Lacan, and Michel Foucault, it absurdly asserts that we experience or process
reality only through language and that, because language is inherently
unstable, nothing can be known. By undermining meaning, history and personal
will, post-structuralism has done incalculable damage to education and
contemporary thought. It is a laborious, circuitously self-referential gimmick
that always ends up with the same monotonous result. I spent six months writing
a long attack on academic post-structuralism for the classics journal Arion in
1991, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the
Wolf" (reprinted in my first essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture).
Post-structuralism has destroyed two generations of graduate students, who were
forced to mouth its ugly jargon and empty platitudes for their foolish faculty
elders. And the end result is that humanities departments everywhere, having
abandoned their proper mission of defending and celebrating art, have become
humiliatingly marginalized in both reputation and impact.

I assume that Robert Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah)
saw it as an intellectual challenge. If Marie Harf and other members of the
Obama administration could not defend their boss’s refusal to utter the words
Islamic terrorism, he could.

To do so, he takes on Timesman Roger Cohen and the Atlantic’s
Graeme Wood. I have already opined on the views of both men. One should add
that Thomas Friedman has also insisted that the Obama administration call the
threat by its name.

As have the president of France, the king of Jordan, the
president of Egypt, and so on. All have denounced Islamist terrorism for what
it is.

The Obama administration stands alone in its refusal to say
the words radical Islam.

Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah) wants to refute the
notion that the West is at war with Islam, but he especially wants to counter
Samuel Huntington’s idea of the clash of civilizations.

To respond to Cohen’s assertion that the West is at war with
the Muslim world, Wright responds:

You
might ask: How could it be a war against “the Muslim world” if it’s confined to
five countries that house only a minority of the world’s Muslims? Or: How could
it be a war against “the Muslim world” if most of the Muslims even in these
five countries are not the enemy?

The center of the Muslim world lies in the Middle East. Think
Mecca and Medina. That culture has fostered and spawned Islamist terrorism. The
actions are certainly not limited to that region. There have been Islamist
terrorist attacks in China, India, Thailand and in other nations of Asia.

If you have a strong stomach click on the link to this story about Islamist terrorism in Bangladesh.

The point is not whether all or the majority of Muslims are
at war with the West. The point is that a significant number are and that the
significant number has caused a significant amount of damage, to say nothing of
loss of life. It doesn’t take too many Muslim terrorists to make everyone to
have to pass through new, improved airport screening measures.

Moreover, as I have often mentioned, the reputation of the
Muslim religion and those who practice it has been significantly damaged by the
fact that the terrorists are speaking louder and more dramatically than other
Muslims. With their beheading videos and their destructive actions, all of
which they perform in the name of their religion, they have re-branded the
religion as a force, as a power, as a competitor with Western civilization.

You might engage in a close reading of certain religious
texts in order to determine whether the terrorists really are following the
precepts of their religion. And you would find evidence both pro and con. And
yet, life is not an exercise in reading texts.

Ask yourself instead how much time and energy we devote to
thinking about Islam. How much time and energy we devoted to it before 9/11.

Many Muslims will insist that their religion does not
condone the actions of the terrorists who are acting in its name. Surely, they are right. Yet, a large
number of Muslims in Western countries believe that the editors of Charlie
Hebdo should have been murdered for their blasphemous cartoons.

If I may say so, actions speak louder than words.

As for Huntington, Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah)
suggests that those who believe in the clash of civilizations are responsible
for producing said clash. Presumably, if there were no books about
civilizations clashing there would be no clashing civilizations.

The thought boggles the mind:

In
1996, when I reviewed Samuel
Huntington’s book “The Clash of Civilizations” for Slate, I fretted that
Huntington’s world view could become “a self-fulfilling prophecy.” This was
before 9/11, and I wasn’t thinking about Islam in particular. Huntington’s book
was about “fault lines” dividing various “civilizations,” and I was just making
the general point that if we think of, say, Japanese people as radically
different from Americans—as Huntington’s book, I believed, encouraged us to
do—we were more likely to treat Japan in ways that deepened any
Japanese-Western fault line.

This suggest there is no difference between American and Japanese
culture, but thinking makes it so. Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah) should
read Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum
and the Sword.

Do you think that, absent bad ideas like Huntington’s the
different civilizations would not even imagine competing against each other? How else do you test the validity of your values but by putting them into practice?

Of course, Huntington’s book is relatively recent. Surely,
Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah) knows about the clashes between
Protestants and Catholics in Europe and the Americas. He knows about the
pogroms launched against Jews and their culture in Europe and the Middle East.
He knows of the pogroms against Confucian culture in China. He must know about
the clashes between Muslim and Hindu cultures in India. And he knows well that
the Muslim war against the state of Israel has been going on for decades now. I
imagine that he knows how Islam established itself through military
conquest, or how the Mongol hordes spread their culture throughout Asia. Among
the causes of the two world wars was the cultural conflict between Germany and
Great Britain. And let’s not forget the wars between Rome and Carthage or
between Rome and barbarians.

Islam has been at war with Judeo-Christian civilization for
as long as it has existed. Why Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah) believes
that the clash of civilizations will disappear if we stop talking about it, I
have no idea.

After all, we have now seen our ostrich-like president keep
his head in the sand about Islamist terrorism for six years. Has that caused
peace to break out in the Middle East? If anything, it has emboldened the
terrorists and has help them to recruit new converts to what seems like a movement that is causing the greatest power in the world to bow in mute submission.

Obviously, Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah) does not
see things this way. He prefers to blame the West, especially people who he
opposes politically. He believes that Western actions are the best terrorist recruiting
tool. It’s like saying that Gitmo is a great recruiting tool for terrorists…
assertion that ignores the fact that terrorists who are released from Gitmo are
welcomed as heroes in their world.

He also ignores the fact that the upsurge in Islamist
recruiting has been a direct response to battlefield victories, shows of Islamist
power and Western submissiveness.

We have been releasing more and more
terrorists from Gitmo under the Obama administration. Yet, remarkably, Director
of National Intelligence Clapper said yesterday, we have never seen more acts
of terrorism.

In any event, Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah) blames
it on drone strikes and, naturally, on Israel:

When
recruiters for ISIS and Al Qaeda say that the West is fighting a war
against Islam, they cite U.S. policies: drone
strikes in Muslim countries, the imprisonment of Muslims in
Guantánamo, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, perceived U.S. support for
Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and so on. Obviously, we shouldn’t abandon
any policy just because our enemies criticize it. But, when the policies help
our enemies with recruitment, that should at least be added to the cost-benefit
calculus.

For those who don’t recognize it, this is recycled
Platonism, the kind that assumes that objects in the real world express
metaphysical ideas. If you can succeed in changing the way people think they
will change their behavior.

Naturally, Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah) believes
that the rise of ISIS is the fault of the Bush administration’s Iraq War. John
Kerry would happily agree.

And yet, as Victor Davis Hanson pointed out, the only
rational way to judge the effectiveness of the Iraq War and the Bush
administration management of same is to evaluate the state of Iraq in
2009-2010, a time when Vice President Biden declared Iraq to be one of the
Obama administration’s great foreign policy successes.

This does not mean that the Bush administration did a great
job, but it does mean that rational debate should examine the facts.

No rational evaluation of the rise of ISIS can ignore the
fact that it arose under the aegis of an administration that prides itself on
having walked away from the fight and that refuses to call Islamist terrorism
by its name.

In Wright’s words:

The
more scared we get, the more likely our government is to react with the kind of
undiscerning ferocity that created ISIS as we know it—and the more
likely Western extremists are to deface mosques, or worse. All of which will
help ISIS recruit more Muslims, thus leading to more atrocities in
the West, as well as in the Middle East, and making the whole thing seem even
more like a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. And so on.

One suspects that this represents the Obama policy toward
Islamist terrorist. Do some therapy, overcome your irrational anxiety about
scary Muslims and, presto, they will all go away.

One can only wonder what Wright (no relation to Rev. Jeremiah)
would say about George Packer’s remarks, also from The New Yorker:

One thing we’ve learned from the history of such
regimes is that they can be stronger and more enduring than rational analysis
would predict. The other thing is that they rarely end in self-destruction.
They usually have to be destroyed by others.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Those who have read my book and who keep up with this blog
have already heard the news. Obviously, I am not the only one who holds this belief.

This morning in the New York Post, Susannah Cahalan writes
about the demise of psychoanalysis in New York:

The couches have gone cold on the Upper West
Side.

Lying
down and talking to a psychoanalyst, a practice once as synonymous with New
York City as the street-vendor hot dog, has fallen out of favor thanks to
shifting fads, pharmaceuticals and the Internet, experts say.

And
shrinks’ average number of active patients on the couch has fallen to 2.75,
according to a study of US analysts. Many of those surveyed said they meet with
no patients.

It’s a
far cry from the height of Freud mania — with its egos and ids, subconscious,
Oedipal conflicts, Freudian slips and death wishes — in the 1950s and 1960s,
when everyone and their mothers were in therapy.

In
those decades, therapists would see between eight and 10 patients a day,
according to analysts interviewed.

As Cahalan explains, Freudian psychoanalysis used to attract
the best and the brightest. It treated those who had influence on the culture. These members of the intellectual elite, I have
argued in The Last Psychoanalyst, helped create a cultural environment where
psychoanalysis was considered to be an effective treatment. It was enormously helpful in producing placebo cures.

In Cahalan’s words:

This
helped attract the best and brightest to the field — and also wooed a new type
of patient dubbed “the worried well.” These patients were a “far more
attractive group of patients than the socially marginal, often impoverished and
ill-educated people who overwhelmed mental hospitals,” writes Andrew Scull,
professor of sociology and science studies at the University of California, San
Diego and author of the forthcoming book, “Madness in Civilization.”

These
patients were members of the intellectual elite, many with significant clout.
It would not take long for this interest to bleed into the upper-middle
classes, where having a shrink was akin to owning a Rolls-Royce; it was a sign
that you had made it.

This
ushered in psychoanalysis’ “golden age,” and its epicenter was New York. At one
point in the 1960s, according to Jonathan ­Engel’s “American Therapy,” there
were more analysts on 96th Street and Fifth Avenue than there were in
Tennessee, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Delaware, Minnesota and Vermont combined.

Directors
and screenwriters in Hollywood embraced the movement wholeheartedly, using
Freudian themes in all kinds of films, from “Rebel Without a Cause” ­(juvenile
delinquency caused by weak father, overbearing mother) to Alfred Hitchcock’s
“Spellbound,” which even had an analyst on retainer.

Obviously, it was all built on air. In time, it succumbed to
the competitive market. Cahalan grasps the concept in the first words of her
title: “Shrinks Can’t Compete….”

Psychoanalysis was an expensive, time-consuming invitation
to self-absorption that could not prove that it worked. It was inevitable that it would lose out to more effective forms
of therapy.

Cahalan explains:

But the
backlash began even before the golden years ended.

Psychotropic
drugs — anti-psychotics, anti-anxiety meds and “mother’s little helpers” —
quickly outmuscled talk therapy as a quick and effective treatment. People ­began
to question: If it’s all a case of faulty neurotransmitters, what help will
talking do?

Psychoanalysis
did little to help its own case. Primal-scream therapy; “the orgone box”
therapy, a metal box that claimed to increase “orgiastic potency”; and
rebirthing therapy only further detracted from the legitimacy of the field.

Then
there was the research — or lack thereof. One study in the 1970s showed that
people benefited less from seeing a shrink than from seeing a clergyman. They
even got more psychological benefit from seeing a lawyer than a shrink.

Another
study around the same time showed that patients who ­believed they were seeing
a shrink but were actually seeing an ­untrained but benevolent professor showed
the same levels of ­improvement as they did when seeing an analyst.

Meanwhile,
in an effort to make psychiatry a more rigorously scientific specialty, an
effort was made to more clearly define psychiatric disorders. The result was
the third volume of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which
expunged any Freudian references, officially severing psychiatry’s tight link
to psychoanalysis.

Analysis
was “withering on the vine,” says Professor Scull. “All of this made them look
more like a sect than a science.”

Another
blow to the profession came in the form of managed care. Now insurance
companies refused to pay for seemingly unending therapy sessions that were not
backed by evidence-based research.

I would add that some patients who consulted with benevolent
professors or even who remained on a waiting list did better than did those who
consulted with psychoanalysts.

Naturally, psychoanalysts are adapting. They have changed
their ways, offered more advice, coached more of their clients. Some of them
even converse with their patients.

Some are happy to continue to call it psychoanalysis. If
that makes them happy, so be it. And yet, it does not fulfill the requirements of
classical psychoanalysis.

In truth, psychoanalysis as we knew it is over. Still, as I have argued it continues to exercise an outsized influence on the
culture.

Jacques Van Rillaer is a distinguished professor (emeritus)
at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Van Rillaer teaches cognitive and behavioral psychology. Recently, he wrote a review of my work
and of my new book.

It is long and detailed, and written in French. I reproduce it as written. Those who
have some command of the language will surely enjoy it. [Those who would like an English translation can follow the link posted by commenter Ares Olympus in the comments section.]

Among Van Rillaer’s other works, I recommend his review of
Elisabeth Roudinesco’s recent biography of Freud. Link here.